Being an adult

Do you remember when we were young teens in the 90s? How we had our own first room, our toy boxes, teddy bears, Super Nintendo? How we slowly felt embarrassed by some of it because we felt it's for kids and felt proud to have our first adult items like a stereo system, a TV or even a DVD player or PC? 

Earlier, I was cleaning "my" apartment, which is actually my father's old apartment on the ground floor of our house. 

Since I had to move from the room I had upstairs in 2018, I tried to make it "my place" step by step. 

It reminded me of how things change and don't change as we grow up. Now I still am somewhere between messy and neat (order in chaos?), but the feeling to want to make a place your own as a status or so that it represents you is still the same. 

And this is just one of the things I feel we experience as teens, but also adults. I am almost 37 now, but I still feel like 20something at best. 

Now that I prepared our entire trip to Indonesia for my mother and me and have helped my father through his lonely days after his wife cheated and divorced him, I sometimes feel like it's me who slowly has to be the parent as both of them can act childish at times. 

So what actually makes us an adult? It seems society feels you are one if you have a place of residence and maybe a job. It still doesn't seem to matter that (at least in my opinion), an adult should be mature and wise. And by that, I mean responsible, levelheaded, able to control our emotions and to having integrity and not just givig in to any temptation or taking the easy way. 

Too many people these days seem to be hypocrites who expect others to be that way while they themselves keep cutting corners.

And didn't we hate such kids when we were kids?